A question for the purists

I'm in the process of stocking my new 330 lt Clearseal tank community (3 months old). When I go down my LFS there are loads of fish that I would love to buy for my community tank however, I was just wondering what peoples thoughts are on mixing fish from different continents e.g African ciclids/catfish with south American ciclids/catfish etc etc.

Bearing in mind each fish have their own unique habitate that varies vastly what are peoples opinions/views on mixing fish species and have you any examples of what you have done.

People have mixed africans and sa cichlids and had no probs but it wouldnt be my cup of tea. Either way, something is gonna have to go without its ideal conditions which is a poor trade off imo. That said, some of those mixed tanks look fantastic and with the array of tank bred species out there, alot of fish go without optimum conditions anyway and thrive. I just like to be able to point at a tank and explain to whoever is interested, what part of the world they are from etc etc.

Jay


Edit...great topic Mike

if the fish are compatible re behavior, feeding and can adapt to the water parameters then imo it is fine to mix them.
some examples would be clown loach and other botias can be adapted to live in somewhat harder water and can be kept with african cichlids as they are tough enough to cope with the feisty cichlids. also bristlenose can adapt and be kept with haps or tropheus and most tangs etc. but not adult mbuna.
rainbowfish are often kept as dithers with breeding tanganyikans.
syno petricola can adapt to live in softer water and are not very predatory or aggressive.
most fish can adapt easily to live at ph 7.4 and temp. 74f but may not breed at this wholesalers and shops would often aim at these values for stock tanks anyway to cater for the quick turnover as it would be impractical to have lots of (specific to species) phs and temps.
having said the above i personally prefer to keep species as close to their natural conditions as possible.

It is a nice project to plan and set-up a 'proper' biotope tank (whatever that really is when talking outside certain waters).

But to me, MY choice of fish and water and psychological compatibility would take priority.

As it so happens, I am forced into having some 'biotopes' only by virtue of many of my fish are 'lone fish' or species-only tanks (eg lungfish, siamese fighters, killifish). But you can't really call them biotopes.

Scattered amongst 3 effectively Amazonian tanks, I have lace gouramis in all of them.
My rams and cardinals keep chocolate and croaking gouramis company; and Pencil Fish (SA) and Threadfin rainbows (Australasian) keep the Honey Gouramis (Asia) happy in a recent set-up.
African knife fish adorn several of my boisterous SA tanks (eg with pacu, geophagus or uaru).

Hence....as you can see.....I'm a purist, but not necessarily when it comes to mixing fish from different continents.

But how 'pure' is 'pure'?

Is a tank full of just Amazon species a true 'pure' tank? do the fish actually come from the same locale within that vast and varied system?

Even with Tanganyikans.....is keeping shallow water edge species along with deeper water species a true 'pure' tank?

There would be limits to keeping fish of different continents even if they tolerated the same water. eg many central americans cichlids will live happily in water with Malawi or Victorian cichlids (I wouldn't go as far as saying Tangs though)....but the main problem is different aggression/submission behavior of the fish if there ever happens to be a dispute in the tank......what may be a sign of submission from a CA cichlid could be read as a sign of 'come on then' by africans and vice versa.
Similar temperamental behaviour differences exist elsewhere, and they would be taken into account.

There are, of course, some fish requiring such specialised conditions that you may find it difficult to get fish from other regions that would be happy. But in my experience (and opinion) they are few and far between in the scope of available fish.

I hope that I am considered enough of a purist to have my reply accepted.

ian

Thanks for the responses people, I don't intend to mix my tank and I know my LFS wouldn't let me either.....very responsible crew that they are. Interesting advice on the syno petricola as I love the African cats.

However for all us enthusiast's with just the one tank, I'm sure we've all had the urge to buy something we know we shouldn't knowing full well that they won't mix or aren't suitable. I suppose that's why I spend so much time at the LFS to get my fix before I go home.

I guess your all mostly purists so far then

Any more examples of mixes of fish please tell.

mine would be fairly varied, i love asian fish but i always see something odd i like and by it. i'll list them out:
denisonii barbs
SAE's
rainbow shark
clown loaches
yo-yo loaches
bumblebee catfish
porthole catfish
cory sterbai catfish
upside-down synodontis
pictus catfish
archer fish

so you can see a wide variety in the continents mixed in the one tank. conditions are pretty average and the fish are all able to stand up for themselves if need be but i never have any agression problems (well, some african butterfly fish got chased by the archers so were moved on)
archers are brackish fish, but brackish conditions range from practically fresh to practically marine. i salt very slightly, and have had no problem with them
now, when it comes to cichlid's i'd be more cautious. they have quite destinct behaviour between continents, and with rift lake ones even between lakes. malawi's and tangs can be mixed, but some tangs will be killed by certain mbuna's etc etc. personally speakiing, i have stocked by "trial and error" although the only error was the aforementioned butterfly with the archers but it was moved before damage was caused.
so long as water conditions are stable and not in the extremes then its only aggression that determines stock, IMO. pH7.4-7.8, 25c, medium hardness and you should be able to carry most of what comes from a shop so long as these are stable values

There are many mixed fish you can use for mixed community set ups, but as the lads say the water conditions and environment they can be housed in is what will determine if its deemed suitable or not. There are fish from opposite sides of the world that will thrive in the same water.
Another question for the purists...do we get bogged down too much on the PH issue and hardness etc.
So many of the fish we have in our tanks are far far far removed from their natural habitat anyhow.
Im sure there are members on here, who have had fish thrive in water that is "On paper" not deemed to be suitable...and yet some may even breed in the water!

Just putting it out there...what do ye think?
Personally I try to create a similar enviroment to that of which they would feel comfortable in. Its impossible to get an exact replica of a certain bio-tope but making it someway similar should help the fish relax, albeit the majority of them will never have experienced a natural habitat in the first place. Of course to throw the spanner in this ideal also, many of the neon and cardinals are wild anyhow,and adapt suitably to tanks with all sorts of uncharacteristic type of set ups.(being a likely beginner fish, Im sure many a child has had lego,funky looksing substrate etc...far removed from its natural habitat, and they seem to do just fine etc.).

Gavin

yep, my sterbai bred in pH7.8 dont know what hardness but its laois water so fairly hard, so the whole "soft acidic water" for cories goes out the window. and i'm not even sure how they started off, i tried inducing spawning by doing everything by the book, but when they were just left alone they'd be at it far more!

joey wrote:

yep, my sterbai bred in pH7.8 dont know what hardness but its laois water so fairly hard, so the whole "soft acidic water" for cories goes out the window. !

joey, this only applies to the asian mass produced corys such as sterbai, aeneus and paleatus. pretty much all other cories still require optimum conditions and would struggle to survive at ph 7.8 let alone breed.
same applies to the loricarids ie bristlenose v the rest.

As Derek says.....and if you read books from the days of very limited captive bred stock, then many would be surprised as to which have some pretty strict water requirements: on the basis of so many being wild-caught.

For many fish, they may adapt with time to water conditions different to the wilds.....with some fish it is quite easy, but others are not so adapting.

Gavin brings up a good point, and one which (if pushed into discussing it fully) I have some opinions upon....the focus he mentions on pH and hardness.

I tend to classify my fish in terms of conductivity as the primary parameter....but that doesn't mean I suggest everyone gets a conductivity meter as it is not as simple as that.

Similarly, pH is not the be all and end all of parameters.....but there are 2 important points about pH:

one is that it is an easy to determine check on water quality and there is a large database on the pH requirements of fish (you won't find such a large database available on conductivity requirements)....and that makes it useful to fish keepers.

It's a bit like a doctor measuring your temperature.....it ain't a bad on-the-spot quick check, but your illness isn't necessarily just having a 'high temperature' (although that could be the case)

The other thing about pH is that pH gets us into some quite complex cyclic chemistry and fish physiology.
In some cases, a certain species may not be able to perform its usual physiology at pHs outside expected; in other cases pH my render another chemical more or less toxic (eg ammonia to ammonium equilibrium) in tank.....and that could also be linked to prevention of normal physiological process of the fish (eg the method of getting rid of ammonia from the body)....in such a case it may be that a certain species of fish are more susceptible to the toxic compound than another fish even if the pH does not disrupt other processes.

Hence, under really good tank conditions a fish may be able to tolerate pH outside of the range of pHs in a tank containing more 'stuff'.

ie it ain't all black and white, and that is why we do hear many anecdotal cases of fishes existing in 'outside' the norm conditions OR fishes simply not surviving in conditions that are deemed 'perfect' (by virtue of only a pH test).

On the Brackish water....that is always a bit of grey area as 'brackish' could mean a lot different things.
Some 'brackish water' fish are more adaptable to fresh water than others; some will adapt very quickly, but the long term health may suffer.....fine for a year, but not for 15 years.

Nature has built some flexibility into many species; and often fish never really work in the wild at their survival capacity......the same with us.....if an animal is pushed to work at full capacity then a little bit of a push will push it over the edge.
I very much doubt that we will be seeing any day yet a captive bred nemo clown fish living happily with our siamese fighting fish in acidic peaty water at 80 F though.

Back to a the purists from experience or opinion discussion....

ian
ian

I thought the concept of a community setup was to mix fishes from different parts of the world that would never have come into contact in the wild. The challenge is to introduce fish that have the same requirements as to water conditions, temperment, size etc, in other words compatable with each other, and would live in harmony, a little like a multi national society im water

igmillichip wrote:

Gavin brings up a good point, and one which (if pushed into discussing it fully) I have some opinions upon....the focus he mentions on pH and hardness.
ian

I for one would very much like to hear what you have to say on that topic Ian. Could do with a crash course on the subect.

Jay

Viperbot wrote:

igmillichip wrote:

Gavin brings up a good point, and one which (if pushed into discussing it fully) I have some opinions upon....the focus he mentions on pH and hardness.
ian

I for one would very much like to hear what you have to say on that topic Ian. Could do with a crash course on the subect.

Jay

Here, I'll probably just make a few notes on the problems or concerns when fish-keepers get a fixation on pH.

The science behind why pH is important, and why there are also parts where it can be relegated to a secondary item are quite complex and long-winded (but maybe I'll see if I have time to do an easy to read piece at some time......it takes longer to write something in non-scientific terms than it does to write in scientific terms ).

pH is vitally important, but it's like vitamin B1 or calcium requirements of all animals (and us humans are the worse examples of fixations on single hypes)......it is not the be-all and end-all of everything.

We could take a 1000 litres of pure distilled water and add a very small amount of hydrochloric acid to get a pH of 6.8....... but you couldn't put fish in that.

We could take some sludge from the sewage works, add loads of limewater to it, then add another load of hydrochloric acid to that to bring the pH to pH 6.8 (it's easy enough)......but you couldn't put fish in it.

We could take some tap water of pH 7.8, add some hydrochloric acid.....drop the pH to pH 3, then add some sodium hydroxide....and it shoots to pH 9.....so we add more hydrochloric acid.....and drop the pH to pH 4.....so we start adding loads of bicarbonate of soda.......we end up at pH 7.4.....but then add some phosphoric acid......and we get to pH 6.2....... but the conductivity and total dissolved salts and the salinity would be so high that we couldn't possibly keep Ram cichlids in it.

pH is a good measure of water quality......but it is the adjustment of a symptom that becomes the problem.

Like my 'temperature measurement' analogy when we go to the doctors...... imagine the doctor taking our temperature and finding we are at 40 C with a high fever, then the doctor says "I'll solve that high temperature reading"......so he places ice cubes in our mouth before taking the temperature reading....and says..."Aagh, fine....you're temperature is down now". !!!!!

A similar analogy is human fixation with things like 'yoghurt health drinks having loads of calcium'......
well, you need calcium for more important things than teeth and bones (tarantulas and amoeba don't have teeth and bones....yet calcium is vital to them).
The calcium intake is of little use if the people never get any sunlight, or are overly lethargic (eg having a lift to school or sitting down playing computer games all day), or are then following the yoghurt drink with a phosphoric acid drink (such as coca cola). The coca cola may directly rot your teeth, but it has another effect by interfering with the calcium uptake from the gut (because of the phosphates.....and spinach etc has the same effect by interfering with calcium uptake)

Similarly, pH and its effect on fish is part of a bigger complex picture.

The pH of measured waters may be due to a multitude of chemicals (or lack of chemicals).....when we measure natural waters for pH then we also need other data: eg
is a low pH due to the natural water lacking certain chemicals?
is a low pH due to the natural water having a high chemical composition yet overall is acidic?
is a low pH just a measurement of the fact that the natural water contains certain vital acids (eg tannins or humic acids), and it is the presence of those that contribute to fish health?
what about temperature? vitally important that any pH is given a temperature reading as pH is temperature dependant.

Then there are the acids for which you cannot measure using pH properly as the chemicals do not themselves donate hydrogen ions (but may cause other chemicals to act like acids). These do occur in natural waters, and will affect water quality....eg such acids as iron chloride and aluminum chloride.

Moreover, pH also determines if a given chemical acts like an acid or not.

This is the key to the role of pH in fish (and any animal) health.

You can have an amino acid on a protein in the gills that will act like an acid at pHs above a certain level (and that amino acid will also contribute to the pH as well), but if the pH drops below a certain level then that amino acid will start to act as a 'base'.
The electrical charge will change on that amino acid, and its total function within the protein will change depending upon pH.
But other factors in the water environment will modify the intensity of the effect of the change.
Reduction and Oxidation potentials (for just one example of a water parameter) then come into play, as does salinity, conductivity, TDS, temperature and other parameters (could be CO2 levels or Oxygen pressure levels if our gill protein is involved with gaseous exchange).

Nature, though, doesn't necessarily work by 'on/off' switches in functional biochemistry......if we take ammonia for example:
it is not true that ammonia simply exists as ammonium at pH below 7 and as ammonia above pH 7. That is rubbish. What happens is that as pH increases there is a tendency for there to be an increase in ammonia, and as pH drops there is a tendency for ammonium to increase.
At about pH 9.2 in standard temperatures, there is about 50% ammonia and 50% ammonium (at that pH the system is in an ammonia buffer zone and the ammonia/ammonium will try to keep the pH at 9.2, and it will require a notable amount of acid or base added to budge it from that buffer zone).

Similarly, the said gill protein will not have an ‘on/off’ state for all molecules when the water pH changes, If nature says that at pH below 7.9 this amino acid will start to act as an acid in this protein (that pH of 7.9 is called a pKa by the way) then at pH 7.9 50% of the population of that amino acids will be acids and 50% will not be acids ie 50% of the protein molecules will act in one way and 50% in another to get an overall modulating effect. It’s a bit magic really and it is a great in-built control system.
Even more magically, nature is poised to work at almost 100% normal load with only 50% of a given protein working properly (unless it is a destructive protein such as in sickle cell anaemia…..but even that is not just pH based, it is also based upon the availability of oxygen).

I’ve used pH on a potential gill protein as an example as even in us, it is pH that controls our breathing and gaseous exchange to a profound degree.

ian

igmillichip wrote:

it takes longer to write something in non-scientific terms than it does to write in scientific terms ).


ian

For some mabey . Looking foward to the "easy to read piece". Seriously though, thanks for taking the time there. It gives the impression of just how important ph is. Mind blowing stuff when you think about it.

Jay

Viperbot wrote:

igmillichip wrote:

it takes longer to write something in non-scientific terms than it does to write in scientific terms ).


ian

For some mabey . Looking foward to the "easy to read piece". Seriously though, thanks for taking the time there. It gives the impression of just how important ph is. Mind blowing stuff when you think about it.

Jay

Science Fact is far more imaginative and impressive than Sci Fi.
Nature plays football in the Uber-Premier league; Sci Fi plays football after a heavy pub lunch on a Sunday.

The strategy and tactics of the mechanisms of living things absolutely fascinates me......and hence am even open to believing the 'impossible' could be possible.

On mixed communities.......we, as fish keepers, often debate this (even if only as a classification of fish on the basis of 'community' or 'species-only')..... but what about us as an animal? How do we truly react (sub-consciously) to having different species from differing regions within our 'space'.
Not a discussion for here, but it is interesting to stop and think about.

ian

christyg wrote:

I thought the concept of a community setup was to mix fishes from different parts of the world that would never have come into contact in the wild. The challenge is to introduce fish that have the same requirements as to water conditions, temperment, size etc, in other words compatable with each other, and would live in harmony, a little like a multi national society im water

Ive got to agree with this - this is the essence of a community tank and most people start with one of these.

Even for the purists though, how many "biotype correct" setups would ever be seen in nature? An Amazonian or even Xingu setup would probably cover a massive scale (the Xingu alone would stretch from Galway to Warsaw). How many of the species we see everyday would actually meet each other in nature? (maybe the answer is "plenty", but I'm not so sure)

The purest of purists' setups must be a species only setup . . . ?

@Jim....I agree.

I have loads of 'biotopes'.....my siamese fighter tanks. The only thing missing is a few rice plants growing.

A mile could even be enough of a dividing line between ecosystems in the wild.

I often have people say to me...."ian, you'll have to meet so and so....you'll get on well as he's from England" (ummm...as if I'd necessarily get on with someone from england any better than I'd get on with someone from here). Silly assumption, and the same goes for simple country or river lumping of fish.

Could you have an Atlantic Ocean biotope? Something to ponder maybe.

ian